TeachingMachines writes: An interesting video is making the rounds, although its claims seem somewhat difficult to believe. In the video (also available here, at the developer's website), a graphics display technology demo is presented that seems to render (no pun intended) the current battle between graphics card makers ATI and NVidia somewhat pointless (again, sorry about the puns). This is because unlimited detail is exactly that: unlimited graphic detail, without polygons. Graphics are instead produced through search algorithms, similar in function to those used by search engines. Pixels presented on the screen, and based on the search algorithm, are based on points rather than polygons (the idea being that each point is equivalent to a screen's pixel, in terms of the colors that are presented to the user). The video demo itself is somewhat, well, alarming, considering that the demo is running in software...

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."

The videos are all well and good, but there's no way to tell from this side how long each frame took to render on their side. A demonstration application that, say, let us fly move around the scene ourselves and see the actual rendering on our computer would show off the technology better. Or, showing off the power better, a viewer application that would open a.3DS model, convert it to point-cloud data, and then render it and al